Fine line black outline city skyline tattoo above a script quote on a person's back.

City skyline and script quote on the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline of a city skyline with rectangular towers of varying heights runs across the upper back. Below it, cursive script reads Just do it for the memor, with the final letters cut off by the edge of the frame. The image is in black ink only, with clean single-needle linework on pale skin and a plain, centred composition.

Fine line Lettering Back City skyline Skyline Building Script Quote Outline

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn a coast by its towers long before you learn its name. On the fourth morning out of Valparaíso, Tomasz the cook's boy presses a tin mug of stewed tea into your hand and points at a grey notch on the horizon that is not cloud. Your watch ends at six. By seven you are at the starboard rail with the rest of the deck crew, counting rectangles the way farmers count sheep.

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The city arrives in pieces. First the tall blocks, then the squat ones shouldering in behind them, a gap where a building ought to be, a spire like a thumb pressed into wet clay. Somebody on the bridge sounds the horn twice. Bosun Ferreira says the old harbour office once kept a painted board of every skyline that had ever greeted a ship, and that the board burned in the year you were born. You do not believe him, but you like him for saying it.

Your mother's last letter sits folded in your breast pocket, soft as cloth from handling. It stops mid-word where the paper creased, and you have carried it across two oceans without finishing it, because you have never been able to decide what the missing letters would have said. The ferry was the only thing that stopped you reading it again.

The pilot boat draws alongside as the sun clears the hills. You take the letter out, look at the towers standing sharp and grey in the first light, and fold the paper back along its old crease. Then you step across the gangway onto a city you have never walked, and you finally understand that a skyline is only a drawing of itself until you go and stand inside it.